1. The Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to rating Internet content. More specifically, the invention relates to dynamically generating Internet-content ratings
2. The Relevant Technology
The Internet is a vast repository of information. The Internet allows individuals, companies, and other organizations to author and publish information that becomes readily available to Internet users. In addition to information, the websites may also offer services and entertainment functions. The Internet allows the interconnection of various content servers. For instance, there exist numerous software programs that allow quick and cheap authoring and publication of web-page documents to web-page document servers. These factors have resulted in the continued proliferation Internet-based content, at an astounding rate. New content, such as, for example, Web sites and Web pages, is added to the Internet on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, there is limited, if any, editorial control over what is published on the Internet. In general, there are virtually no standards for accuracy and in many cases little or no standards for decency. Further, the ubiquity of the Internet allows content legal posted at first physical location (e.g., first state or country) to be accessed from second physical location (e.g., a second state or country) where the content may be illegal. For example, a gambling web site may be operated from a physical location that allows legalized gambling but accessed in a second location where gambling is illegal.
The ready availability of questionable and potentially illegal material has also created various problems in corporate and home environments. In the corporate environment, an employee's ability to access pornography or other objectionable material may create a hostile work environment for other employees subjecting the corporation to various legal liabilities. Additionally, employee productivity may suffer as a result of employees accessing the Internet for personal reasons while the employees should be performing company tasks.
In a home environment, parents may have an interest in controlling the content in web-page documents accessible by children or others in the home. Unfortunately, Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) and Web-page operators typically provide little protection to prevent children from accessing sites that may include pornography, gambling, hate and racism, and other potentially undesirable content.
Accordingly, various Web filtering mechanisms have been developed to block electronic content, for example, based on a domain or URL associated with the electronic content. Web filtering mechanisms typically place domains and/or URLs into content categories (e.g., sports, legal, technology, news, etc.). An administrator can then assign user access rights to each content category. For example, the administrator of can configure a Web filtering product (a desktop computer, gateway, caching device, firewall, etc.) to permit or block user access to content categories. Access rights to particular content categories can be based on personal or organizational Internet access policies. For example, an organizational policy can require blocking access to gambling and adult content sites, while allowing access to all other sites.
However, Web site operators are aware that such filtering mechanisms exists and often take measures to attempt to counter the filtering mechanisms. For example, Web site operators can frequently change URLs, Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses, or domain names or include content form other categories in their Web-based content. Thus, Web sites that do not want to be blocked, like pornography and gambling Web sites, are constantly varying their configuration to circumvent filtering systems and filtering companies. This adds a new level of difficulty to the filtering process, since rules that are currently valid for blocking Web sites might not be valid in the future.
Conventionally, some filtering of web-page documents is done by software installed on client computers. However, this requires constant updating of a database on the client to maintain a list of content categories and, for example, approved and non-approved sites. Additionally, this client side filtering software may be disabled by tech savvy employees or children. Further, software installed on a client provides no provision for new sites or new web-page documents that are added to the Internet between database updates.
Accordingly, there have been at least some attempts to implement automated and/or server-based approaches to Internet content filtering. However, the ever-increasing and ever changing Web-based content causes many of these approaches to suffer from the same problems (e.g., accuracy) associated with client side filtering. Accordingly, what would be advantageous are mechanisms for dynamically rating Internet content.